I’m not there, Babe - Swedish Nobel panel seeks Bob Dylan

..And it wasn't Dylan on the BBC news, either.

Bob Dylan, who was announced as the recipient of the Nobel prize for Literature on october 13, 2016, as he was on June 3, 1984. Istvan Bajzat / EPA

STOCKHOLM // More than 48 hours after awarding Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize for literature, the Swedish Academy says it has still not managed to speak to the famously reclusive US singer.

Mr Dylan has so far uttered no comment on his award and didn’t even mention it when he played to a packed crowd in Las Vegas a few hours after the announcement on Thursday.

And the singer-songwriter certainly did not figure in the BBC’s report on his Nobel Prize. The British broadcaster has admitted showing footage of a Bob Dylan impersonator in its Six O’Clock News bulletin.

When searching for stock footage, a young producer at the BBC mistook a tribute act for the real thing.

But viewers were not fooled and took to social media to mock the BBC with messages such as“It Ain’t Him, Babe” — a paraphrase of one of Dylan’s best-known songs. The BBC report included a 20-second black-and-white clip supposedly of the star. Instead, the film was of an unknown Dylan tribute act performing Dylan’s song, Like A Rolling Stone. One fan said the impersonator sounded “like a strangled cat.”

The BBC said it had launched an investigation into how the error came about.

“At the end of the Bob Dylan package, some archive footage that had been incorrectly labelled as him was used. This was a production error which was rectified for the Ten O’Clock News, “ said a spokesman.

A source at the BBC attributed the mistake to the youth of the junior producer. “Perhaps when you’re in your 20s, one old rock star looks pretty much like another, “ he said.

*The National Staff